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Treating Cockroach Phobia With Augmented Reality

Dropping fake cockroaches into the real world shows how uniquely convincing augmented reality can be.

July 2, 2010

Augmented
reality–overlaying the virtual world on top of the real world–has been used in everything from
neurosurgery to iPhone apps. But until researchers at the Spanish Universitat
Jaume got the bright idea to simulate hoards of cockroaches swarming
over insect-phobic volunteers, no one had thought to use it as part of what’s
known as exposure therapy.

In
exposure therapy, the phobic person puts him or herself in the presence of
whatever they fear–heights, spiders, etc.–until, through habituation,
they lose their fear of that situation or object. The literature shows that
exposure therapy works, but it has problems–for one, people who qualify
as clinically phobic will often drop out of treatment when their psychologist
tells them they’ve got to confront whatever their worst fear.

Augmented
reality for exposure therapy promises to change this. Like Virtual Reality,
which has been successfully used to treat phobias including fear of heights and
spiders, patients seem to be more receptive to engaging the fantasy of their
fear than the real thing.

Treating
Cockroach Phobia With Augmented Reality describes, for the first
time, a trial of augmented reality with a small group of people who all
presented clinically significant levels of cockroach phobia. These six women
reported problems that ranged from wanting to sell their apartments because
they’d seen a cockroach or two in them to once spending two hours on top of a
table, waiting for friends to arrive, after seeing a cockroach on the floor.

The
system uses a typical VR google headset - the kind that completely
obscures the wearer’s vision - coupled to a 6DOF, or six degrees of freedom
tracking system which allows the computer to know exactly the location and
orientation of a wearer’s head, so that it can line up the virtual world with
the real.

Combined
with a camera on the front of the headset, the system allows researchers to
show wearers both the real world and realistic cockroaches. The paper reports
that the roaches could skitter, wave their antenna, and even change size from
small and medium to hideously large.

Patients
were exposed, over the course of a single three hour session, to anything from
a single stationary cockroach to up to 60 swarming, skittering bugs.

The
results were a stunning: Study subjects went from a phobia so profound that it
interfered with their lives to passing a “test” that involved walking
into a room containing a cockroach in a tupperware container, removing its lid
and placing their hand in it for at least a few seconds.

This work raises the
possibility that augmented reality may be uniquely useful in treating phobias
precisely because the fusion of the real and virtual worlds is so convincing
- further suggesting that augmented reality will be particularly
compelling in countless other applications, from manufacturing and education to
gaming and… other entertainments.

Learn today what the rest of the world won’t know until tomorrow, at Business of Blockchain 2019.

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Christopher Mims was a contributing editor at MIT Technology Review between 2011 and 2012. Before that, he blogged about the converging crises of the 21st century for Grist. He… More has also reported for Wired and Scientific American, and worked on various projects for the BBC, The Atlantic and Smithsonian.

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